Are American high tech workers obsolete?

[Jerry Feldman]

Open source is a good thing, but there is room for both proprietary and 
open source products. I think one can look at the drug companies for an 
analogy.
The cost of development of a product is high, and that business needs to 
amortize the cost of R&D associated with that product. However, once that 
is realized, then the drug can become generic. 
Same with a software product. I see that Sun and OpenOffice.org have come 
out with a new licensing agreement that works and that can be used to allow 
the open source community to share sources with proprietary developments. 


On 14 Aug 2002 at 15:46, Hewitt Tech wrote:

> There is an open source aspect to all of this that may be good news for
> domestic technical workers. The more open source software is used by end
> users and companies, the more need there will be for folks that are local.
> That is, when a business is using Linux for example, they will need to have
> consulting resources (as well as regular employees) who know Linux and can
> configure or make changes to it. In a very real sense control will be
> shifting away from companies and their proprietary products to local experts
> because the code will be available wherever it's needed.
-- 
Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
Associate Director
Boston Linux and Unix user group
http://www.blu.org PGP key id:C5061EA9
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